Filmmaker Johan Renck’s moody new existential relationship astronaut movie with Adam Sandler, “Spaceman,” debuts today on Netflix. It’s the filmmaker’s first feature in 16 years, following 2008’s “Downloading Nancy,” but it’s not like he’s been away. After a career started in music videos—famous clips for artists like Madonna, Beyonce, Kylie Minogue, Robbie Williams, and more—Renck has spent the better part of the last decade in the world of television (before that, in the late 90s and early aughts he was a singer-songwriter using the moniker Stakka Bo).
“Downloading Nancy” led to Vince Gilligan asking him to direct episodes of “Breaking Bad,” which led to shows like “The Walking Dead,” “Halt and Catch Fire,” and “Bates Motel” and the two-episode pilot premiere of Netflix’s “Bloodlines.” But Renck’s perhaps most critically acclaimed TV work came with 2019’s “Chernobyl” created and written by Craig Mazin (“The Last Of Us”), which won him DGA and Emmy awards for his efforts.
“Spaceman,” starring Adam Sandler, is arguably very different from all his recent work. It’s a lonely man-in-space relationship drama and arguably one of the unconventional films Sandler has starred in, very much playing against type. A kind of intergalactic story of love and self-discovery—which in some ways feels like a David Bowie song rendered cinematically, Renck having directed some of the late icon’s final music videos— the film centers on cosmonaut Jakub (Sandler), off in space on a lonely mission to investigate galactic lights that are flickering on the edge of the galaxy. Half a year into his solo mission on the edge of the solar system, he becomes concerned with the state of his life back on Earth and is helped by an ancient arachnoid creature (voiced by Paul Dano) he discovers in the bowels of his ship (Carey Mulligan also stars as Sandler’s earthbound wife, also in the midst of her own personal crisis).
It’s an odd, hypnotic movie in many ways, but a captivating and fascinating one, certainly putting Adam Sandler into a vein we’re generally not used to and pulling a terrific voice performance out of Dano, which is so evocatively tender, curious, lonesome, and empathetic. We spoke to Renck just as the film was about to premiere on Netflix. Here’s our conversation.
You made your first feature, “Downloading Nancy,” back in 2008; this is your first feature since then, 16 years later. Is it safe to say you’ve been occupied in the land of television since then?
One hundred percent. For the last eight, nine years, maybe even ten years, I’ve been doing a lot of limited series. After my first film, I got into some episodical stuff for various reasons, but it was good and fun in quite a few ways. It’s also not really my cup of tea because I’m a filmmaker. I want to be part of the world-building and see the thing; see the thing through from A to Z. So, limited series became a good way of doing that because it’s essentially a very long movie cut into six or five or eight or whatever parts, you know? So, that is what I’ve been occupying myself with most lately.
But [directing all of a limited series] is a little too taxing; you’re dealing with like 120 shooting days, and stuff like that, and I have a big family, a lot of kids; so, as much as I love doing limited series, honestly, I do think it’s an exciting format to work with. It’s just not feasible for me right now. My kids are getting older; they have meaningful, relevant existence with friends and school, and you can’t just pull them out of school for half a year.
And going through your credits, I imagine there must be a massive difference between directing an episode of, say, “Breaking Bad” here and there and directing the entirety of all of “Chernobyl.”
Yes, and they are two utterly different ventures. I worked on “Breaking Bad ” for several years, you know? And you come in; the casting’s already done, the location scouting is already done, and stories are pretty much written. There’s little room for anything relevant to get into there as a director. Of course, you’re helping the actors get to the point you want them to, and so on. But as a filmmaker, it’s not a particularly interesting place to be, to be honest. Unless it’s your own thing and you’re there, overseeing it, directing several episodes, and riding it through. But I’ve never had any particular interest in that. I do think that my years of episodic television were my film school. That’s it. You know, it was just that together with music videos, which were my way of understanding the medium.
So, it’s definitely a long time since your last feature; how did this one come together?
Like most, a producer on the film, Michael Parrot, my production company partner, had optioned this book after several years of working together and developed it into a script Something like four years ago. When he sent it to me, he had always had me in mind for it. I had just come out of “Chernobyl,” and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was exhausted, very spent. I also didn’t particularly have anything in mind; I needed a break or focus on something different.
But the script became undeniable from the onset because I read the script. I read the book, and I felt that this was something I really wanted to lay my hands on because it was a very personal perspective on life and loneliness, but also primarily on how ambition and your own wants and needs get in the way of maintaining meaningful relationships. So it became very relevant to me, and in many aspects, Jakub, the main character, that’s me to some extent.
So, in L.A., you take a lot of general meetings, And one of them was with Adam Sandler, which is great because I’m a big fan of his. I love his stupid comedies, but I also love his other films, the more serious ones, “Punch Drunk Love,” “Funny People,” “Uncut Gems,” etc. So I met with him, and we had a real, meaningful con conversation, and he asked me about it, like, “I heard about this space film; can you tell me about it?” So we got into a conversation there, and one thing led to another, and then we made a film [laughs].
It’s interesting that he was the one who initiated it and was interested in it because, in many ways, it’s the most unconventional film Sandler has ever made, even more so than, say, “Uncut Gems.” He’s obviously very quiet and restrained in the movie because he’s mostly just by himself or talking to an alien or himself.
I see what you’re saying, maybe from a pragmatic strategic point of view. But I think Adam Sander is a very good actor, and I think he’s tremendously watchable. And I think his, so to speak, his appearance, all the subtleties that make Adam Sandler, Sandler, felt very suitable for this film. For me, in some weird way, I think, again, the main character in this film is kind of me. So I felt that he was the perfect candidate to play a version of me, but also that he’s a comedian, which makes him fearless, which is a good thing to deal with when you’re making films.
A lot of great comedians have done great, profoundly dramatic work: Peter Sellers in “Being There” or Jim Carey in ‘Eternal Sunshine,’ there are tons of those films that we can talk about in which a comedian is completely unraveled into a serious role where, where all of the comedy has been stripped off them. And when that happens, you perceive somebody like Sandler with even more vulnerability because of the fact that you know that this is somebody who’s almost always slightly obfuscated by a comedic side, you know?
And when all the frills are gone, and it’s just the person, as you see in the film, he’s so vulnerable and exposed. I’m not a hundred percent sure at all that the film would have obtained this same level of abject loneliness and lostness, based on his arrogance and all that, if we had gone with a more conventional dramatic actor.
I hear you. Sandler is definitely at peak lonely, lost vulnerability in the film. He’s just floating off into space, which reminds me that this entire movie reminds me of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in a kind of cinematic form. And you worked with Bowie, too, on some of his final music videos.
Yeah. That’s funny. It’s interesting. Adam is also a massive music fan, and yeah, I got to work with Bowie. And Adam would always say things like, “Man, David would’ve loved this film because there was definitely a Major Tom vibe going on with this character and the slightly absurdist aspect, too. What do I know? But I would also guess that Bowie would have liked the film too because it also visually embraces the spirit of the music, which is profoundly relevant as part of the experience. So yeah, you’re not wrong.
Bowie arguably first defined the idea of the lonely astronaut in pop culture and maybe etched it in our minds in a way we’re not always conscious of.
I think you’re absolutely right. You have this lonely spaceman, and Earth is doing what Earth is doing. And once you’re in space, you realize how insignificant you are because nothing changes on the planet when you’re not there.
And, as you can tell, this film is not a science fiction film, per se. It’s more of a relationship film about regret and loneliness that happens to take place in space. In all honesty, there’s a version of this film that could have been a man sailing on a solo journey across the Pacific Ocean while his wife is leaving him. Or a man on a work trip while his wife realizes their relationship can’t continue. To place it in space is just a way to pull it to stretch out the themes to their max to obtain the effects of how we relate to the distance between them. Here, it’s unobtainable long. It’s 500 million miles between them. Weirdly, that individual loneliness is amplified by sprawling, unfathomable distances, you know?
Paul Dano’s arachnoid voice character role is quite something, too; such emotional inquisitiveness and tenderness, searching and a longing that is somehow just as sad and lost as Sandler’s character. I imagine, though, that they weren’t really on set together.
No, they weren’t at all. We linked them up, and Paul came to set on a couple of occasions to hang out. Paul and Adam linked up on Zoom calls for rehearsals and stuff. I was involved in a couple of those; they did some of it independently, too. But at the same time, yeah, the film came together in pieces. Adam’s acting alongside a tennis ball—I’m exaggerating. We had a friend of mine who’s an actress and performance artist help because I felt she could embody some of the peculiarities of the creature. But she also had to hide behind a wall sometimes because you need clean plates for VFX and things like that.
So, Adam was acting on his own for a significant part, and then the whole thing was cut and put together with temp voices for the arachnoid character until we were ready to go with Paul. But that’s the beauty and maybe downfall in some cases of CGI characters because you can keep rewriting and refining them in perpetuity, so it’s all seamless. You reanimate a bit, take Paul, rewrite, and record, but yeah, it was well over a year between filming Adam and then doing Paul’s side of it. But I hope you get the sense that they’re together and there’s an intimacy and personability in terms of their relationship that you never questioned whatsoever.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
“Spaceman” is available on Netflix starting today.